Storefront Church on Scott Walker, L.A. Nightmares, and Competitive Magic

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I thought Lukas Frank's first record as Storefront Church, As We Pass from 2021, was a really promising debut—and his latest, Ink & Oil, takes a sharp left turn from the various shades of indie rock found on its predecessor. When I've described it to friends I've been like, "It's one part late-period Scott Walker and one part Father John Misty," which is QUITE the intriguing and risky combo to strike—but he pulls it off very well. I hopped on a call with Lukas a few months ago to discuss this balancing act of his, as well as a few other fascinating conversational detours...

There's a pronounced sense of growth in size between the last record and this new one. The music just sounds bigger in general. Talk me through this latest evolution of Storefront Church, so to speak.
I don't really know what came over me. I just felt this overwhelming need to dial it up to 12. I've always been really inspired by film music, and I wanted to make a record that sounded like a film score. I had a lot of these songs in my head and the way that they were going to sound before I even started working on them. It was just an overwhelming need to make something that sounded as maximalist and as big as possible, but also, I could kind of hear it already that way somehow.

The approach goes against the grain of what's in vogue with indie rock right now.
I definitely don't consciously make music in terms of what other people are doing. When I set out to make a song, it's not because of what my peers are doing, necessarily. But this record definitely felt like a response, in a way, to what I'm hearing—something I wanted to hear, and wasn't. And I understand why! This record was a pain in the ass to make. It took a really long time and was a really cumbersome way to make music. It makes sense that not everyone's rushing to have a full orchestra on every song. But it was just something I had to do, for whatever reason.

Tell me more about the cumbersome aspects. You can definitely hear the work that went into it.
When As We Pass was done, I was already working on this one. I spent the whole pandemic working on it, and it was done by the time that was "over." Then it sat on a shelf for two years, so it's really been five years in the making with three years of active work on it. I spent a long time just conceptualizing the songs. I could really hear a lot of them in my head—I knew how they would begin and end — and I was alone in my room trying to figure out how I could pull it off.

I knew this guy, Travis Warner, an orchestrator for David Campbell—Beck's dad who did all the strings on Sea Change, which is some of my favorite string arranging out there. Travis and I just put our heads together about how we could get that huge sound on a small record. After two years of demoing songs out, him and I finished the orchestral arrangements. I wasn't staying in L.A. at the time—I was in Connecticut, so when I came back to LA I didn't have a place to stay, so I was living at my engineer's for a little while. We tracked the rhythm section and added the orchestral stuff on top, and on top of kind of losing it a little bit during isolation, it just took a long time.

Tell me about your pandemic experience.
I was lucky that I could kget out of L.A. during that time, 'cause L.A. was almost on fire. A little side story that relates to why I left is, as a kid I had had this recurring nightmare about this uncle of mine who disappeared from prison. He would visit me in my sleep. When he disappeared from prison, all that was left in the cell was a single orange, for some reason. People in my family used to joke that he just turned into an orange. But he'd visit me in my sleep, and it seemed like his mouth wasn't working. He was holding an orange, and he had the skin peeled back and had written something on the on the rind. I just had this dream over and over again, until one day it stopped.

But when the fires came back in L.A., the dreams came back with a vengeance, and in a really crazy way—more vivid, new storylines, new perspectives. I felt weirdly connected to my uncle in this very strange way, and I ended up leaving to stay with my family on the East Coast for about seven months. Something about the sun looking like an orange ball in the sky when the fires hit—like it was this perfect orange in the sky—I think that did something to me. They were almost like fever dreams, or strange visions. Weird things kept happening to me over and over again, and they crept their way into the album. Those last six months on the East Coast were super formative for for the sound of the record—a lot of the missing pieces came together then.

I'm curious to hear you talk more about witnessing the effects of climate change in L.A. We had the smoke from the fires last year, and the day of the orange sky—it was all very ominous and horrifying. It doesn't feel good to live through this.
Los Angeles is a harrowing city in some ways. On top of climate change, there's an extreme homelessness crisis and drug epidemic. It's all right next to each other in this way that feels so dissonant and maddening. You have these skyscraper loft apartments downtown, right next to Skid Row—and they're empty. No one lives in them. It's crazy-making, and you get this emotional whiplash living living here and being close to all of that.

In making this album, I was really interested in acknowledging some of those stark contrasts. The climate crisis stuff is something that has weighed so heavily on me as a as a young person growing up here. I went to this little hippie school here in L.A, where they made us very conscious of all this stuff that was happening—but, then, everyone just went about their lives as usual. That felt dissonant and strange, and when I was making As We Pass, I went through a long period of feeling like everything was dying around me. If As We Pass was about living in that reality, this record is about the delusions and weird coping mechanisms.

Let's talk about the song "Coal," which really stands out to me because it emphasizes Scott Walker's influence in your music.
That song doesn't get to exist without him. I didn't grow up listening to him. I discovered him late, and once I discovered him, all bets were off. It changed so much for me. I had this idea of making this record, and then I discovered him, and he'd done it in this different way, but in this way that also made so much sense to me. Every now and then, you come across these artists who have had the same...I don't want to say we've had the same thoughts, but you hear it and you're like, "Ah, this person must understand something about me." You feel seen by that person, you just feel understood when you hear it.

I also feel really challenged by his music in a way that's exciting. He has a quote in one of the documentaries, where he's playing Tilt for the head of his label. He's blaring the record super loud on the big speakers. They get through listening to it, and the head of the label doesn't really know what to think of it. He says, "Can we listen to it again, but maybe on the smaller speakers and turned down a little bit?" Scott's like, "Yeah, okay, sure." They start listening to it, and halfway through he pauses and says, "You know, I'd really like to put it back up on the big speakers and turn it back up, because this is almost surely the last time I'll ever listen to it."

Some of my favorite music, I just never want to hear again, you know what I mean?Replay value is really overrated. His music does that for me, where it's some of my favorite stuff ever, but I can only listen to it with years in between [when I listen to it next]. Some of it is really beautiful and I could listen to it every day. "Coal" is very inspired by a film score that he did, and it's a prime example on the record of trying to pair exact opposite emotional spectrums in the same place.

Let's talk about movies. What have you enjoyed lately?
I just saw Challengers, which I loved. Last year was such a good year for movies. I saw The Taste of Things, which has no music in it the whole time.

That's one of the things on my list to still see from last year.
Man, you will not be disappointed. It's so beautiful, such a special movie. I just watched it for a second time with my girlfriend. I also loved The Zone of Interest. Mica Levi is just such a special artist. Anatomy of a Fall, too—there were so many good movies last year, it was kind of crazy. Dune 2 I really loved.

Yeah, I had a good time during Dune 2. It was fun. I was just just saying to a friend that both Dune movies are kind of like screensaver films to me. I just sit back and have a great time at the movies with big images. 
What could be better? It's so visually beyond. It's not like a Transformers movie where it's leaning on its visuals in that way, though. I was moved by the visuals. I saw it in the Chinese Theater here in L.A., which just felt right. It was really cool.

Did you see Civil War?
Yeah. I liked that. In the past year and a half, I've started doing some more scoring work, and my scoring partner is in a band called Agriculture. He and I have gone to the movies together a lot, which has been really nice. I grew up watching movies with my dad all the time, and a lot of my instincts come from film score tricks. So it's fun to learn how to work on an actual movie.

Talk to me more about score work, and how it differs creatively from what you do as Storefront Church.
Scoring is so different, man. I've been having so much fun doing it, and I love it a lot. But I'm not in charge when I'm scoring, you know? I'm helping and serving someone else. When I'm making Storefront Church [material], I still feel like I'm kind of serving something else, but I'm not.

Scoring is such a pleasure and a different process. We've done two features now, and one is a documentary about a couple where the husband has early on-set dementia—when you go from being someone's partner to being their caretaker. It's heartbreaking and very homespun—a lot of home videos and things like that. I can't really do my Storefront Church epic thing on something like that, you know?But I get to figure out what my thing is in that sort of setting.

The other feature is a docu-fiction thing about this woman who breaks horses and is a mother figure to all these teenage kids. For that one,  the director was very clear that she wanted all guitars. That's kind of foreign to me, too. So it's been really fun to work within these different constraints and see how that's affecting the new music coming down the line as I learn these new tools. When I was making Ink and Oil, I was scoring this non-existent movie, you know? I could just make my own beats to hit. 

Let's talk about Magic: the Gathering—I know from other interviews with you that you're an avid player. What's the story there?
I started as most do—as a child. From there, I had a hard time letting go. I put it down because I thought I'd get beat up in high school if I kept playing. Then, I was in a Target checkout line almost 10 years ago, and I "relapsed" on Magic: the Gathering. I was competing in tournaments again—not just casually playing with friends.

Magic has led to meeting some of my favorite people in music. I met Cole from DIIV through playing Magic, as well as Caroline Polachek—all these different people, just from being at a Magic tournament. I recently went to the U.S. Regional Championships in Denver.

How was that?
It was good. I got 50th out of, like, 2,500 players or something.

 Oh, hell yeah.
After that, I was like, "I gotta take a break."

What was your gameplay strategy?
I was playing a deck called Amulet Titan that is a very obnoxious, feel-smart strategy. You have to pick a deck and run with it for the whole tournament, so I locked that one in a couple months before and was doing a lot of training and preparation. I was taking it very seriously.

Sounds like it paid off.
It did pay off. I did not think I would get nearly as far as I did. If I had won the last round, I would've qualified for the pro tour, which is like the pinnacle competitive Magic. But as I was sitting down for my last round, I was like, "I can't go to the pro tour—I have work to do. I can't keep doing this." I'm so glad I lost the pro tour, which would've been this week. This week has been the craziest work week, and I don't know what I would've done. Music has always been getting in the way of my Magic career.

Why do you think Magic endures amongst creative types?
Lukas: It's so fucking cool? [Laughs] You get to customize the way you play—there's aesthetics to it that you can also customize. There's incredible thrift-store art on the old '90s cards, which is so fucking cool. You can pick which version of a certain card you want to play and make your deck look a certain way, and you can approach the game in a way that suits you. But a lot of my music friends are not as over-the-top in their in their interest in the game—they've casually gotten into it. It's also a good thing to do on tour, when you just have hours and hours of downtime.